FAQ and Email Guidelines

Requests to meet: Please come to my office hours on Tuesday. If that's not possible, please email me.

Questions about our research: Please begin by reading my publications, and those of the HCI group. If you have a question that is not addressed in our publications, contact the first author of the related publication. When that's me, I'll do my best to respond.

I'd like to do my MS/PhD in HCI. What Stanford department should I apply to?
Stanford is a great place to do HCI research, because there are excellent faculty researching interactive technology all across the university. My department, Computer Science, will be a good fit for students with a strong technical background. Computer Science graduate admissions are handled at a department-wide level. If your strength lies outside of computer science, apply to the home department that best matches your skill set. Examples include Product Design, Learning Science & Technology Design, Communications, and Work, Technology, & Organization.

Stanford is a great place to be an undergraduate or graduate student, and I encourage you to apply. However, I cannot help with the admissions process to any graduate or undergraduate programs, and will not respond to any email in that vein. The admissions committee looks at a range of factors, including grades, test scores, and recommendations.  One particularly important point is evidence of ability to do research -- if you have done research, your chances of admission are far better.  I highly recommend stressing this in your application. If you've been admitted; congratulations! We hope you'll come, and I'll do my best to field questions from students interested in HCI.

Stanford undergraduates interested in research internships: Stanford has a fantastic undergraduate intern program, CURIS, that I strongly encourage you to apply to. I am willing to advise a small number of talented undergraduates interested in working on topics related to our group's research. Swing by my office hours to discuss this.

Non-Stanford students interested in internships: Generally speaking, I do not have the resources for non-Stanford interns. I will not respond to internship requests from students. If you have research experience in HCI, and are interested in a project related to our group's work, please have a faculty member at your university email me, and have them include an explanation of your particular qualifications for HCI research.

Graduate Advising: One of the best parts of a faculty position is working with talented graduate students. If you have taken (or are currently taking) a graduate HCI course, or have research experience in HCI, I look forward to talking with you about doing research together. Otherwise, please begin by taking one of our HCI courses and attending the HCI seminar.

I’m an undergraduate/masters student interested in human-computer interaction; what courses should I take?
Your junior year (1st year for masters), I'd recommend taking CS147 in the fall and cs247 in the winter. Your senior year (second year for masters), I'd recommend taking CS376, CS378, or a CS377. To provide a methodological grounding for HCI, I'd suggest taking quantitative methods and statistics (e.g, Psychology 110 or 252, or Comm 268), qualitative methods (e.g., MS&E 383), and cognition (e.g., Psych 55 or 205). A complete list of HCI-related courses is available here.

Recommendation Letters: Writing recommendation letters is one of the important things I do, and seeing students succeed in the next chapter of their lives composes a big part of the satisfaction I gain from my job. It also take a lot of time. Unfortunately, a decent fraction of this time isn't the intellectual effort of composing a thoughtful letter, but the administrative tasks of gathering all the resources I need to write the letter, keeping track of the students/locations/status table, and dealing with the idiosyncracies of all the web-forms. (It may be surprising to some, but the web has made letter-writing more time-consuming, not less.) If at all possible, please...

1) Ask for recommendation letters at least a month before they're due. While I can often get to them sooner, this lead time lets me work around travel, big deadlines, etc., so that I can block out a free, quiet time to write a thoughtful and substantive letter.

2) Send me one email that contains all of the information required to write the letters. This email should contain: your transcript & CV/resume, a complete list of all the locations I should send the letter, and a summary of the work we did together. Note any courses you took from me, and any particular highlights that you see. My memory is pretty good, but external aids are always helpful. This email should, if possible, specify email addresses for each location rather than web forms. If a web form is required, include the URL in this email.

Lastly, and most importantly, after you've been out in the world a while, let me know how you're doing! I'd love to hear from you. Email me the exciting things you're up to, and also share any ideas you have about new things we should be teaching at Stanford.